Saturday in Charge
1. I arrived to work at seven. There were two babies due for their bottles. There was no formula powder, and the door to the storeroom was firmly locked.
2. While I listened to report on one ward, a surgeon rounded in another. He wrote no orders in his charts.
3. That surgeon looked more than a little surprised when I sat down across from him in the dining room and pulled out my clipboard.
4. Word came that the pager system would be going down, so I paged everyone I could think of, just to get my two cents in before it happened.
5. And then I rounded on a bunch of other patients, ones I didn't really know, since I've been stuck in the ICU for the past week or so.
6. I sent half of the patients in the hospital out the door.
7. I also tried to get my patients discharged from the computers before the database went down. I was not successful.
8. Once the engineers started testing the emergency generators (the reason for all the computer troubles) the lights started flickering like a disco. The patients were, for the most part, amused.
9. And then the OR supervisor stopped by to let me know that, with the emergency generators offline, there would be no functioning OR equipment, so no emergencies please.
10. Close on her heels followed the hospital manager, requesting the pharmacy keys.
11. It turns out the fridges in the pharmacy also run on emergency power. So they were warming up fast and needed to be plugged in to regular power. Which would have been easy if the plugs weren't waaaay at the back.
12. We muscled one of the fridges to the side, but were stopped by another cabinet. This left only a small crack.
13. I tried to slip through to unplug the machines, and this is where my African shape comes into play.
14. Not surprisingly, my top half fit, but my bottom half was not quite so successful. I thought about being embarrassed, but decided to take it all in stride.
15. The hospital manager disappeared and returned with the skinniest person he could muster up, who was thankfully victorious.
16. The day wouldn't have been complete without an emergency admission, a little girl with an infection who needed IV antibiotics.
17. Once we got her settled, I turned to the next patient who had been brought in from the dock. She peeled back the bandaid on her arm to reveal what looked like a stick, living up to its name by sticking to her wound.
18. On closer inspection, it turned out that she had seen a little thread in her arm, a leftover stitch. She must have been eating chicken when she discovered it, and not wanting to lose sight of the stitch, she stuck a skinny little bone underneath it as a placeholder. This is the sort of thing that only happens in Africa, and the sort of thing that makes days like that totally worth it.
And just when I thought it couldn't get any better than a chicken bone, a whole bunch of us loaded up a whole bunch of Landrovers and headed to the beach. We sat on the sand in the fading light of the day and watched the waves and read Steinbeck's short stories to each other. When night fell, we lit a bonfire and roasted marshmallows while the moon rose.And now, if you'll excuse me, it's my three month-aversary, and my husband is taking me out to dinner.
